PERCEPTUAL PRESENCE

Plausibly, any adequate theory of perception must (a) solve what Alva No calls 'the problem of perceptual presence,' and (b) do justice to the direct realist idea that what is given in perception are garden-variety spatiotemporal particulars. This paper shows that, while No's sensorimotor view arguably satisfies the first of these conditions, it does not satisfy the second. Moreover, No is wrong to think that a naive realist approach to perception cannot handle the problem of perceptual presence. Section three of this paper develops a version of naive realism that meets both of the adequacy conditions above. This paper thus provides strong considerations in favor of naive realism.